<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2017 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
 * 
 * This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 * 
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 * 
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org./licenses/>.
**/

$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'I came out to my mother.',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		No, not about that!
		About my name change.
		My mother&apos;s still in denial last time I checked, but I told my mother about my asexuality as soon as I knew myself.
		That is to say, gradually, as I learned that others aren&apos;t actually like me.
	</p>
	<p>
		I got my coursework submitted, then wrote to my mother to see if I could come over.
		They actually responded this time, so I met with them.
		As I rode over, I noticed they have a new van.
		I suspected they had a new vehicle for a while, as their totalled car has been parked at the curb instead of in the driveway as it normally was.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve been preparing for the worst, but hoping for the best.
		As such, I&apos;ve gone through countless mental simulations of this event, both good simulations and bad simulations.
		The response I got wasn&apos;t as expected, but it was by far on the better end of the spectrum.
		It was one of almost ... indifference, but not in a bad way.
		It was like it was just any other topic that might&apos;ve come up.
		The topic even changed quickly, as something came up, then shifted back when the situation allowed.
		That is to say, it wasn&apos;t an attention-grabber.
		However ...
	</p>
	<p>
		They wanted to know why I hadn&apos;t told them before.
		Um.
		Because they&apos;ve been freaking out about it?
		Whenever I&apos;d introduce myself in front of them, they&apos;d get ticked off I wasn&apos;t using my <del>legal</del> <ins>birth</ins> name.
		Now, they claim that the problem was the frequent changing.
		Over the past two and a half years, I&apos;ve changed what I call myself no more than twice.
		Additionally, if I don&apos;t try out different names, how was I to know which name I liked?
	</p>
	<p>
		My mother did ask about if I was changing my surname, though not in those words.
		I kind of hoped that&apos;d come up, but also kind of hoped it wouldn&apos;t.
		Mostly, I wanted it known, but didn&apos;t want to bring it up.
		They didn&apos;t say it right away, but when I mentioned I wouldn&apos;t be sharing a name with my father, they said that was why they asked about the surname.
		They&apos;re happy I&apos;m leaving that name behind, though not for the reasons they&apos;re happy about it.
		My given name and surname have been the middle name and surname of their ex.
		That will no longer be the case.
		Unfortunately though, Vanessa asked about my middle name.
		That&apos;s the one thing I really didn&apos;t want brought up.
		But I knew if it did come up, I wouldn&apos;t lie, and I had my explanation ready.
		My mother disagrees with the premise, but doesn&apos;t seem to have a problem with it.
		To be clear, I don&apos;t like that some places default to using a middle initial when using your name without talking to you about it first.
		If you leave out my middle name, I don&apos;t mind.
		If you use my full middle name, that&apos;s fine too.
		However, I find it incredibly disrespectful and rude to be so lazy that you use just my middle initial.
		MY mother claims it&apos;s not a default though, as not everyone does it.
		My mother uses a middle initial with their name, which is fine because they <strong>*actively choose*</strong> to do so, but their bank doesn&apos;t put their middle initial on their card, while mine does even though I don&apos;t want it.
		Um.
		Yeah?
		Your point?
		It&apos;s not a default <strong>*everywhere*</strong>, but that doesn&apos;t mean it&apos;s not a default <strong>*anywhere*</strong>.
		It&apos;s a default at my bank and at some other places I&apos;ve dealt with, and it&apos;s something I don&apos;t want to deal with.
		Now I won&apos;t have to, ever again.
	</p>
	<p>
		It turns out the reason my mother didn&apos;t respond to my message asking to come over <a href="/en/weblog/2017/05-May/09.xhtml">last week</a> was that the message never came through.
		$a[SMS] is notoriously unreliable, and the message was simply dropped.
		We looked through their past messages to and from me, and there simply wasn&apos;t one where there should&apos;ve been.
	</p>
	<p>
		It seems we might not be telling my mother&apos;s mother.
		I hadn&apos;t planned on telling any of my mother&apos;s family, as I wasn&apos;t planning on requiring my mother to have anything to do with my new name.
		This visit was only to ensure my name was not a secret.
		I don&apos;t want the stress of trying to hide this, and if I tell them now, there&apos;s nothing to hide.
		<strong>*not*</strong> telling them yet has been hugely stressful.
		I was fine before I decided to tell them, but since deciding to take this route and not being able to meet up with them, my neck and back have been acting up as badly as before I moved out.
		Hopefully now, I can go back to my new normal of living pain-free.
		Anyway, my mother&apos;s mother is ... nuts.
		More so than my mother.
		My mother&apos;s just regular crazy, but my grandmother&apos;s brain deteriorating quickly.
		They&apos;re too old and time has taken a major toll on their well-being.
		My name change is not something my grandmother needs to deal with.
	</p>
	<p>
		My mother talked about the hassle of changing legal documents, something they&apos;d know about.
		They&apos;ve changed their name four times!
		That was a fact I was prepared to bring up if they started getting weird about my wanting to do it even once, but I didn&apos;t need to.
		It did come up anyway because Vanessa didn&apos;t get right away why our mother knew of these hassles.
		I&apos;ve planned for the legal document issue though.
		I need to get my $a[ID] updated.
		That has been the reason for this mad rush to change my name now to begin with: my current $a[ID]&apos;s expiring.
		I&apos;ll also need to get my Social Security card updated.
		I&apos;ll inform University of <span class="redacted">[REDACTED]</span> pretty quickly, as to try to make my new name the one visible to other students next term.
		Next, I&apos;ll need to get my employer to fix the name on my paycheques.
		After that, I&apos;ll need to update my name with my three financial institutions.
		It might be a pain explaining to Chase that Alex Yst was me all along.
		Finally, I&apos;ll need to update my name with less-regulated companies, companies such as the utility company and my property manager.
		There might be some I&apos;m forgetting, but these will be the major places I&apos;ll need to update my name.
		My mother also mentioned the price, saying it used to be \$90 $a[USD] to change one&apos;s name in the courts, but it&apos;s probably gone up.
		Yeah, it&apos;s gone up.
		Up to \$111 $a[USD].
		(What a strange number ...)
		Again, I let them know, mostly to show I&apos;ve done my research; this isn&apos;t some sudden thing.
		I mean, it&apos;s kind of sudden, but not <strong>*that*</strong> sudden, and I was always going to change it eventually.
	</p>
	<p>
		My mother asked again about my hair clips.
		Maybe I should&apos;ve brought a hat ...
		They claim the clips are girly, and when I explained that hair clips are only attached by most to the female sex through social convention (that is to say, only attached artificially), they didn&apos;t seem to get it.
		They think artificial attachment that doesn&apos;t serve any sort of good is still a valid form of attachment.
		I don&apos;t think they grasp the concept of gender, and that&apos;s a can of worms I didn&apos;t want to open up today.
	</p>
	<p>
		Speaking of which, they asked why I don&apos;t like my birth name.
		I told them about the fact that the name is a kingly name, and I&apos;m not a fan of those that would claim dominion over others.
		However, I didn&apos;t touch the fact that my name&apos;s too masculine.
		They will see in time that I reject the concept of gender roles, but I&apos;m not yet ready to directly come out with that, at least not for now.
	</p>
	<p>
		They also asked me about my hair.
		I always tried to cut it short, but they wouldn&apos;t let me.
		They even threatened to kick me out over it!
		Now, they claim to have never done that.
		However, what led them to boot me?
		My hair!
		I forget their initial reason for telling me to find somewhere else to live.
		I could look it up in my journal, but I don&apos;t care to.
		It doesn&apos;t matter.
		However, they later tried to take it back.
		I didn&apos;t chose to move out; I chose not to back down.
		I said if I was staying, some changes would be required.
		I told them they needed to stop being so over-controlling.
		They asked how they were over-controlling, of course.
		They always made me very nervous and I would lose my thoughts and words when I was around them.
		There was so much that they held over me, they were always so restrictive, but the only thing I could come up with offhand was my hair.
		They threatened to boot me if I cut it as short as I liked.
		With that, they told me I needed to move out after all then.
		In other words, I <strong>*was*</strong> booted over my hair.
		So why didn&apos;t I cut it now?
		Why was I growing it out, when I&apos;d been so determined to cut it before?
		It was never <strong>*about*</strong> the hair, but about the <strong>*control*</strong> they imposed on me!
		They still deny they exerted this control though.
	</p>
	<p>
		It seems Vanessa&apos;s taking some sort of $a[HTML] class.
		Not only are they not teaching Vanessa proper coding practice, they&apos;re not teaching Vanessa certain concepts at all, then expecting Vanessa to implement these concepts.
		Vanessa&apos;s having to look up resources from other places and isn&apos;t fully understanding them.
		I helped Vannessa a bit, though we didn&apos;t have an assignment there to work on together, and hopefully they&apos;ll email me with any other problems they have.
	</p>
	<p>
		The visit took three whole hours.
		I&apos;m busy and didn&apos;t want to stay that long, but I knew it&apos;d likely happen.
		That was the price I paid for not keeping my name a secret and not cowardly telling my mother via email.
		It was totally worth it.
		Not to mention it was good seeing Vanessa and our mother again.
	</p>
	<p>
		The neighbour&apos;s Internet connection was down when I got home, but I&apos;ll probably tell Vivian and Cyrus tomorrow about the legal name change.
		I wanted to tell them before, but it wouldn&apos;t be right asking them to keep it a secret from our mother until I got a change to tell our mother in person.
	</p>
	<p>
		My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="university">
	<h2>University life</h2>
	<p>
		I forgot about course registrations.
		I&apos;ve now registered for next term&apos;s courses.
		I always seem to forget, and a big part of that is because the university tells me about registrations at odd times.
		They tell me long before they open, then expect me to remember.
		I have a lot going on!
		So I don&apos;t remember.
		Then, after registrations have been open for quite a while, they send me a reminder.
		Like, why can&apos;t one of their notices be on the day registrations open?
		Seriously.
		Also, it seems the registration page doesn&apos;t function without JavaScript, so I had to enable that, register, then disable it again so I could work on my coursework without the website locking up on me.
	</p>
	<p>
		I finished up my discussion posts for the week:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			It certainly worked out for the Romans, but it was still a dumb move on their part.
			It put them in an extremely vulnerable position, making it potentially easy to cause them a lot of harm from the inside.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			That&apos;s a very good point.
			The Greeks were very open, and probably didn&apos;t have it in them to be manipulative like that.
			I wish more people these days were like the ancient Greeks.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I find it very interesting that many people know the Roman names for mythological figures instead of the Greek ones.
			You can see this even in the naming of the planets and Pluto.
			It&apos;s been strange to me, as I learned the Greek names instead.
			When discussing Roman mythology, I actually have to look up what Greek god each Roman name corresponds to.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Yeah, it&apos;s almost as if the Romans became Greek.
		</p>
		<p>
			The reading material also discussed Rome&apos;s paganism as a negative effect of the influence, though that makes no sense to me.
			It&apos;s not like paganism is any better or worse than any other type of religion, and paganism wasn&apos;t particularly violent or anything like that.
		</p>
		<p>
			The arch was a powerful piece of engineering to learn!
			It provided structural integrity to the Greek, and later Roman, architecture.
			I find it interesting though that the pointed arch is more stable than the rounded arch.
			The rounded arch looks better to me, but the later development of the pointed arch made buildings more stable.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			It seems related that a creative people, the Greeks, had such superstitions and passed them on.
			Their creativity came hand-in-hand with wild imaginations.
			Such imagination could be (and was) put to constructive use, but it could also be (and was) put toward the creation of harmful superstitions.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve been very disorganised this week.
		I never even got to the <span title="Programming 1">CS 1102</span> reading assignment.
		Later, I should go back and read up.
		The assignment was as follows:
	</p>
	<ul>
		<li>
			<a href="https://docs.oracle.com./javase/tutorial/java/IandI/abstract.html">Abstract Methods and Classes (The Java™ Tutorials &gt; Learning the Java Language &gt; Interfaces and Inheritance)</a>
		</li>
		<li>
			<a href="https://docs.oracle.com./javase/tutorial/java/IandI/createinterface.html">Interfaces (The Java™ Tutorials &gt; Learning the Java Language &gt; Interfaces and Inheritance)</a>
		</li>
		<li>
			<a href="https://docs.oracle.com./javase/tutorial/java/IandI/polymorphism.html">Polymorphism (The Java™ Tutorials &gt; Learning the Java Language &gt; Interfaces and Inheritance)</a>
		</li>
		<li>
			<a href="https://docs.oracle.com./javase/tutorial/java/IandI/subclasses.html">Inheritance (The Java™ Tutorials &gt; Learning the Java Language &gt; Interfaces and Inheritance)</a>
		</li>
		<li>
			<a href="https://docs.oracle.com./javase/tutorial/java/IandI/super.html">Using the Keyword super (The Java™ Tutorials &gt; Learning the Java Language &gt; Interfaces and Inheritance)</a>
		</li>
		<li>
			<a href="https://docs.oracle.com./javase/tutorial/java/concepts/inheritance.html">What Is Inheritance? (The Java™ Tutorials &gt; Learning the Java Language &gt; Object-Oriented Programming Concepts)</a>
		</li>
		<li>
			<a href="https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=9ddaYywxGms">CS1102 Introduction to Programming 1 (Java) Unit 6 Lecture 1 - YouTube</a>
		</li>
		<li>
			<a href="http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/c5/index.html">Javanotes 7.0, Chapter 5 -- Programming in the Large II: Objects and Classes</a>
		</li>
	</ul>
	<p>
		Without time to complete the reading, I just jumped to the programming assignment.
		The assignment was poorly structured, but easily easily completeable.
		I completed the assignment to the letter of the instructions, though if I didn&apos;t have certain parts of the instructions holding me back, I could&apos;ve written better code.
		No matter though.
		Lastly, I completed my grading, <span title="Programming 1">CS 1102</span> ungraded quiz, and <span title="Greek and Roman Civilization">HIST 1421</span> graded quiz.
		I read another chunk of the text before taking the <span title="Greek and Roman Civilization">HIST 1421</span> quiz, but I didn&apos;t have time to complete the reading entirely if I wanted to speak with my mother today.
		I ended up reading the rest once I got home, but the quiz was past due at that point.
		Had I waited to take the quiz, I wouldn&apos;t&apos;ve been able to take it at all.
		Still, I only got one question wrong, so I didn&apos;t do too poorly.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="docmod">
	<h2>Document modifications</h2>
	<p>
		On <a href="/en/weblog/2017/11-November/02.xhtml">2017-11-02</a>, this journal page was modified in order to redact the name of the university.
	</p>
	<p>
		On <a href="/en/weblog/2018/01-January/16.xhtml#Vivian">2018-01-16</a>, my sister, Vivian, requested that I replace all instances of her legal name in my journal with the name &quot;Vivian&quot;.
		She also asked that the name of the organisation she works for be redacted.
		This page was modified to fulfil that request.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
